Hardfought just turned fourteen years old today! Happy birthday Hardfought!! Weeee… hrm. Ok. Enough of that silliness ;) So, what all has happened around here since this time last year? We delved into the world of Bitcoin for a few months and played around with that for awhile. Had a real-time ajax-based chatroom put on the site, which is being used as I type this. Finally got around to getting a solid SSL certificate installed (yay). We’re now back to folding, and with a vengeance at that. And last but not least, the latest game craze appears to be some console title known as ‘Destiny’. It’s some Halo knock-off made by the folks over at Bungie that has most everyone here all hot n’ bothered. Whatever, Nethack still rules them all :)

Nice little milestone was reached today. Hardfought has been in exsistence for 5000 days straight, or 13 years, 8 months and 10 days. Noticed that this morning when I loaded up the site. Pretty neat. Commence celebration, go :-)

Since December 2013 I’ve been playing around with cryptocurrency, the most popular one being Bitcoin. You may have heard about it on the news or on the internet here and there over the last few months. Bitcoin has been around since early 2009, but didn’t really go mainstream until last fall when the price shot up to over $1100 a coin. I decided to jump into the game with a few rigs that do nothing but ‘mine’ Bitcoin and other alternate coins based off of it.

Because of this, we now have a new sub-forum entitled ‘cryptocurrency’ and have seen an influx of new users to the site. There are a few posts in that forum already, showing off everyone’s mining rigs, how-to’s for certain programs, etc. If you have any questions about mining for digital currency, or want to post about your own experiences, feel free.

So now, we have an alternate coin that just went live less than a week ago that has more of a purpose than just solving an evermore complex mathematical problem that doesn’t do any good for anybody other than the coin it produces. Those of you reading this may remember when Hardfought created its own Folding@Home team (it’s still alive thanks to Grant :) ). What is ‘folding’? In this particular instance, it’s a process in which you use your computers CPU and GPU to help solve all of the different ways a protein can ‘fold’ into different shapes, and how they fold determines how they interact with other proteins. There isn’t a supercomputer on the planet that has enough computational power to solve all the ways even a single protein can fold in a quick amount of time. That’s where Folding@Home comes in – they devised a method of distributed computing in which each persons home computer takes a small piece of the problem, works on it, solves it, uploads it to the F@H servers, then grabs another piece. So on and so forth. So what once would have taken years if not decades to solve now only takes months. Folding@Home has been active for almost fifteen years now, with millions of computers working on cures for diseases such as many forms of cancer, Alzheimer’s, and Parkinson’s just to name a few. And the only compensation all of these ‘folders’ have received for their time and money spent, is knowing that they are helping to find a cure. Nothing more.

Enter Curecoin – a cryptocurrency developed by a small team of people who are passionate about the Folding@Home project who have worked out a way for folders to earn Curecoin while folding. You can mine for this coin just like you can for Bitcoin, also. I wont go into all the technical details here, but I will say that this is unlike any other digital currency to date. The work you’re doing to earn coins actually has a purpose; the work is not wasted, and actually benefits everyone. There are a couple other coins out whose proof of work has purpose (Primecoin, Namecoin), but this is the first one that actually HELPS people.

Well, it’s happened. Hardfought officially became a teenager today. Happy 13th birthday to the site and the remnants of its community. Thirteen fucking years… holy shit. The average length of your typical American marriage doesn’t even come close to making it this far. Hah! Alrighty then. Well, again, happy b-day Hardfought. Let’s go sign you up for a facebook account, now that you’re old enough…

Oh snap is RIGHT. After nearly 2.5 years of chugging along on my super-slow little netbook that could barely run three tabs in Chrome at the same time, I’ve got a new system. Got my hands on an ASUS K55A series laptop. Nothing too high-end, but it does have a third-gen Intel core i7-3630QM under the hood and the HD 4000 integrated graphics is no slouch when it comes to gaming. I fired up Dragon Age and Team Fortress 2 last night just to see how it would perform. Couldn’t max out the graphics like you’d be able to using a dedicated ATI or Nvidia graphics solution, but I didn’t have to settle for minimum settings either. The CPU runs nominally at 2.4GHz but it will boost up to 3.4GHz (in the screenshot you’ll see it’s down-clocked to 1.2GHz when not being taxed to save on power). Four dedicated cores with hyper-threading enabled… everything runs pretty smooth, at least everything I’ve thrown at it so far. So, when time allows I may play a few rounds of TF2 or maybe try out something new. Gonna revisit some old RTS games I really like also, like some of the Command & Conquer series. And I can’t wait to use Photoshop or decode DVD’s on this system, should run fairly fast. Lemme know what games you guys are playing right now. Woot!

Hi all. Happy belated New Year!! Hahah… ok. I think we can all agree that it’s good to see 2012 put away and retired, time to usher in a new year. Lots of crazy shit went on, but at the same time I gotta say that 2012 will be one of my best years ever for the simple fact that my daughter was born in 2012. She’s eleven months old today, can’t believe she’s coming up on one year already. Those of you that are parents weren’t joking around, the time really does go by fast. I will NOT miss diaper changes… the faster that time goes by, the better :-) Anyways, I hope all of you had a great Christmas and New Years holiday.

Hardfought stuff – I have been fixing a LOT of look n’ feel stuff on the site over the last month (see the phpBB modification log for a lot of the fixes and changes). With WP-United back in full force from a couple months ago and being able to update the site, that really gave me the ‘bug’ again. I feel like I have a better handle on things this go-around, which is making things easier to identify and fix and/or tweak. Just resolved a glaring issue with private messages. Comments on the wordpress side look much cleaner than previously. A lot of areas now have a more polished and rounded look. So on and so forth. If any of you notice something that isn’t right that I’ve missed, please lemme know. I was looking back in the news archives, specifically back in the spring of 2009 when Hardfought got it’s first real overhaul… holy crap I remember a lot of the mess I had to fix back then, hah! Several of ya were pretty good at helping me find issues for me to fix… would be nice to see that level of participation again someday. Not a lot of traffic nowadays and that’s ok, I get it. Ah well. It’s all good.

Merry Christmas!! Just wanted to put that out real quick while I had a moment. It’s mini-K2’s first Christmas this year and she had a very exciting time. Out of everything she got, it was the mallet from the xylophone that was the biggest hit. And the wrapping paper :)